More Diversity in New York City’s Police Dept., but Blacks Lag

New York City police officers and recruits leaving a diversity training event at the Apollo Theater in Harlem last week.Credit
Yana Paskova for The New York Times

It is among Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly’s prouder legacies: A majority of the police officers in New York City are now members of minorities, and have been since roughly 2006.

But as the Police Department has attracted an increasingly kaleidoscopic range of nationalities to its ranks in recent years — officers hail from Albania to Yemen — department statistics reveal a decline in new recruits among black New Yorkers.

The decline comes despite aggressive recruitment efforts in places like central Harlem and the Bronx, where the department regularly assigns friendly recruitment officers to visit.

In 2003, 18 percent of the Police Academy’s 2,108 graduates were black. Of the 1,247 recruits who started the academy this summer and will graduate on Friday, blacks make up about 10 percent, according to the department. By contrast, the percentage of Hispanic recruits has remained around 25 percent from 2003 till now, and the percentage of white non-Hispanic recruits has actually risen in recent years, to 57 percent from 52 percent in 2003.

There are many possible explanations for the decline, including demographic shifts in the city’s black population, a rise in the number of new immigrant applicants and possibly the highly publicized reduction of officers’ starting salary midway through the decade. (It was since raised to a base pay of about $42,000.)

The Police Department’s aggressive stop-and-frisk tactics may have played a role as well. As the percentage of black recruits to the Police Academy zigzagged downward over the last decade, the number of recorded street stops, mostly in minority neighborhoods, rose higher, sowing distrust of the police.

“I think most people are past saying ‘Oh, don’t be a cop,’ ” said Orayne Williams, 22, a senior at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who is from Flatbush, Brooklyn. “But it still does exist. People from the community have that mind-set.”

Standing nearby, his friend Parris Bailey cut in. “I like the stop-and-frisk idea; they need to be able to do their job,” said Ms. Bailey, 21, who lives with her parents in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and counts “Law and Order” among her favorite shows. But she said she never considered being a police officer.

“Defense attorney,” she said.

Mr. Williams said he was preparing for the Law School Admissions Test, not the police exam.

Police departments often struggle to diversify their ranks, and the New York Police Department has made strides over the last decade. It is roughly 30 percent Hispanic at the patrol level; it has more than doubled the number of Asian police officers since 2003; and it is slowly moving toward being majority minority across all ranks. (About 52 percent of the 34,000-member force was white at the start of 2013; 16 percent was black.)

By contrast, at the Port Authority Police Department, blacks make up a small part of each academy class. Out of 217 graduates in 2012, 13 were black. That is up from just four in 2008, the last year of new recruits.

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Police Department statistics reveal a decline in new recruits among black New Yorkers, despite aggressive, brochure-strewn recruitment efforts in places like central Harlem and the Bronx.Credit
Yana Paskova for The New York Times

Recruiters for the New York Police Department, who are officers themselves, pitch the job mostly for its benefits: compensation of over $90,000 after five and one-half years, the option to retire after 22 years with half pay and health care. The recruiting slogan is: “Be Proud.”

At the start of the Bloomberg administration, attitudes toward the police in minority neighborhoods softened in anticipation of a shift from the law-and-order approach of Rudolph W. Giuliani and a string of police shootings of black men. Under Mr. Kelly, the department pushed to increase diversity while requiring two years of college credit or military service to enter the academy.

Yet critics charge that police behavior in minority neighborhoods over the last decade has hindered efforts to attract black officers, alienating many young men and sowing broader resentment. “We had this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde recruitment strategy that played out in the community,” said State Senator Eric Adams, a retired police officer.

“I had a conversation with Commissioner Kelly around this,” he added. “He had to acknowledge that the Police Department is not doing well at recruiting black men.”

John J. McCarthy, the department’s chief spokesman, pointed to statistics showing the overall diversity of the department and that, since 2010, the percentage of blacks taking the Police Department exam had remained relatively constant, fluctuating between 17 and 20 percent of all test takers. Those who pass may not become officers for a variety of reasons, including residency requirements and background checks. (There is also now a two-and-a-half-year wait between the time an applicant takes the test and enters the academy, possibly dissuading some.)

“Although the N.Y.P.D. is smaller than it was over a decade ago, the agency is more diverse than ever before,” Mr. McCarthy said. “In fact, the N.Y.P.D. is the most diverse police department anywhere in the world.”

The incoming police commissioner, William J. Bratton, had to deal with similar apparent distrust in Los Angeles. Under his leadership, the department convened focus groups with African-American residents to learn of their concerns before trying aggressive recruiting. Some said they actively discouraged their children from joining the force.

“One group that was particularly adamant against young black men joining were mothers who saw their sons, and in some cases their grandsons, jacked around over the years,” said John W. Mack, a former head of the Los Angeles Urban League and then president of that city’s police commission during Mr. Bratton’s tenure there. “And why would you want your sons to join a police force who was doing that?”

The situation can be frustrating for black officers in New York.

“This is a great job,” said Detective Yuseff Hamm, the president of the Guardians, a black fraternal organization that dates from 1942. “This is a great career. This is an absolute benefit to the citizens of New York. But a lot of people don’t look at it that way in the community.”

Detective Hamm said the biggest challenge was attracting new black recruits who do not already have family members in law enforcement. Stop-and-frisk, he said, is just one of many concerns. “It comes up in them saying, ‘Is that what I would have to do?’ ” he said. More often, he said, the department’s educational requirements pose problems. “It’s necessary, but a hindrance at the same time,” he said.

Census data shows that the number of blacks who could be eligible to be hired by the Police Department — 21- to 35-year-olds with at least two years of college living in the city or surrounding eligible counties — has increased since 2000. At the same time, said Susan Weber-Stoeger, a demographer at Queens College, the number represents a smaller percentage of all New Yorkers who fit that criteria.

Outside John Jay College, Mitchell, 21, a black senior from Canarsie, Brooklyn, said he was in the process of joining the force in 2014. (He declined to give his last name for fear of violating department rules.)

“All the cops there on Utica Avenue, the white cops, look scared,” he said of a thoroughfare that cuts through some minority areas. “What are you scared of? The black cops you see there, they’re relaxed.”

A version of this article appears in print on December 27, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: More Diversity in City’s Police, but Blacks Lag. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe